"Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation?" Guy de Maupassant

This is a brilliant attempt by Stuart Henshall at creating a really neat model for how collaborative spaces can really work to harness and augment collective intelligence. There's loads of good stuff being written on this topic - on collective intelligence, collaborative spaces, corporate blogging and on better knowledge management systems. Yet this is the first piece i've seen that makes me feel it is a model that is really 'workable', in a corporate set-up, and not just among bloggers and KM specialists.

And the first to focus not just on the tools or on their benefits - but on both.

How might the growing interest in linking digital identity, blogging wiki's, RSS feeds etc evolve? How might the emergent functionalities in these tools benefit our evolution and daily experiences. How will they combine and spiral to augment our collective intelligence? How will they reframe the KM knowledge innovation paradigm? For most companies it's happening more rapidly than they think.

There's a saying "the future is here - it is just unevenly distributed" (William Gibson). This couldn't be more true when we start to apply it to emerging lightweight knowledge innovation tools and combine it with what we know about mobility, decentralization, hyperconnectivity, online identity etc.

Yet using the metaphor "standing in the future" we almost inevitably find ourselves reframing the space we compete in today.

I facilitated the chart below about three weeks ago before going somewhat silent (at least on my blog) when exploring early ideas for transforming a "systems integration business" into an innovation engine. As the tools paradigm developed we kept spiraling back to the benefits. Each iteration breaking a new frontier, each new technology providing new functionality.

It's a WIP (work-in-progress) and making the point that all these technologies are already available they are not just effectively connected yet. For the most part it will be bloggers reading this. Some have the curiosity to ask: Is corporate blogging just noise or part of a greater shift. What about wiki's and the broader aspects of augmented social networks? Etc.